All posts in Productivity

With today’s fast pace of living, it’s vital to have on-the-go access to everything that’s important to your work.

Rather than staring blankly out of a window on your train or bus to work, you could then instead be planning your day and organizing meetings, or commenting on tasks and sorting through your inbox to avoid getting distracted at the office.

However, with the sheer variety of technology on offer it’s also difficult to know what mobile apps you should be using.

That’s why I asked the Process Street team to share the best mobile apps for business they have installed and how they use them.

From the most valuable apps across our entire company to one-off niche cases that could do with a little more exposure, in this article I’ll highlight the apps that let our team stay productive and make every moment count.

They cut down on pesky repetitive tasks and do things that would take humans much more time and energy.

Bots started out as weak, experimental and expensive, but the rise of SaaS and automation means that you can have your very own family of bots, living exactly where you work: Slack.

Slack isn’t just a place to chat with your team, it can be extended to:

Check your emails or aggregate your newsletters into a public channel

Send notifications from Trello, JIRA, or hundreds of other apps

Stream tweets that match a certain hashtag or keyword

Update your calendar

Save your reminders and to-dos

Store company knowledge and resources (like a chatbot attached to a wiki)

…and a million more time-saving (and fun) things

Slack is simple, text-based, searchable and allows you to customize it in creative ways. It’s the perfect environment for simple bots that can replace the need for time-consuming or interrupting tasks, and its Slack App directory makes it easy to find and plug a bot right into Slack ready to use.

But, before we get into all of the cool stuff Slack bots can do, let’s get the basics down first and talk about the original: Slackbot!

Most Slack users know Slackbot as the friendly and helpful character that helps them set up their profile. It sits in always-on mode in your direct messages, occasionally popping up to give you notifications. It’s easy to forget, but you’re missing out on a lot of great features if you overlook it.

Evernote is the Swiss army knife of productivity tools. It does a hell of a lot, but doesn’t do anything amazingly well. Maybe it was designed to replace your need for multiple apps by rolling them all into one, but its feature bloat makes it a pain to use, and there are many Evernote alternatives you can use instead.

We’ve already written a lot about Evernote; everything from Evernote templates to a comparison against Microsoft OneNote. In this article, I’m going to suggest worthy alternatives to Evernote in the areas of notes, screenshots, documents and bookmarking. While technically Evernote does do all of these things, there are more options out there.

From 2009 to 2010, Evernote jumped from 2 million users to 6 million. Impressive, right?

Not compared to its 2017 figures.

Evernote now boasts over 200 million users and over 5 billion notes created. Evernote has become a real player in the world of cloud technologies. What started off as a simple note-taking app to help you store your thoughts has become a powerful tool with multiple potential use cases.

You can still use Evernote to store your notes, but it is capable of much more than that. The much more is what we’ll be investigating in the course of this article.

Unlike apps and websites, there isn’t really much of a difference between users and active users. The operating system you use is something you use every time you are on your computer – probably every day.

This is why we at Process Street have decided to try to piece together a number of tips and tricks we think you may not know which can help you make the most of your operating system and boost your workflow. Some of them might improve performance and others may increase productivity.

We’ve compiled this big list to help you make the most of your workspace!

I’m a Chrome user, and I was sold initially on their minimal design and layout, along with the speed advantages it used to have.

However, other browsers have caught up in many areas and narrowed Chrome’s competitive advantages. What Google’s product still offers which sets it apart from the rest, is a huge store full of extensions and add-ons. The extension landscape Chrome offers cannot be rivaled.

Many of these extensions changed my workflow and increased my productivity. They might be able to do the same for you.

So, we’ve decided to break down a host of extensions which can add value to your browsing experience.

But what happens after that is the hard part. Straight after hiring comes the onboarding and training. That’s the part where you get your new VA up to speed with how your company works, and how the tasks, rules, and responsibilities are going to be different from the other companies they’ve worked for.

You’ll need to explain how to use your stack of tools, and how they can work as efficiently as possible. It’s also a process for you: you need to remember to check in, make sure everything’s set up properly, and review their performance.

In this post, I’m going to go over some of the key things to keep in mind when onboarding a virtual assistant, and share two of our internal processes with you.

Ignoring your alarm repeatedly creates a habit, and habits are hard to break. You start to ignore it more and more because you’ve conditioned yourself to do so. Even if you want to get up early, your subconscious is working against you.

Small snoozes quickly add up too – just 15 minutes each day sends 91 productive hours down the drain every year. That’s more than two working weeks you waste each year.

Knowing how to wake up early is only half the battle – to start your day the right way, you need to make it an automatic reaction to your alarm.